The Story Behind “What Would I Say?”

That was the first phrase generated just for me this afternoon by What Would I Say?, a new app that runs users’ old Facebook status updates through a text-generating bot to produce phrases that are variously nonsensical, funny, or, with enough attempts, oddly resonant. Some of my other early results included: > I come to smash a tale of desperation, decision, and regret with sad eyes

A great Recession.

Back to the habit of eating flecks of things

Friday as good a day as any for my wedding

I come neither to bury nor to learn its definition in British slang.

The app was created by Pawel Przytycki, Ugne Klibaite, Vicky Yao, Daniel Jiang, Edward Young, Harvey Cheng, and Alex Furger—all graduate students at Princeton—during last weekend’s Princeton Hackathon. Klibaite, a student in the school’s Quantitative and Computational Biology program, explained the process in an e-mail: “We drank a lot of coffee and Red Bull and thought of fun things we could program that we could actually complete in a day and a half.” They also received assistance from an eighth team member—a Yorkipoo named Baxter, who, according to Klibaite, “knows a total of fifteen tricks including ‘beg and look ashamed.’”

Some of the phrases dragged and repurposed out of my Facebook past yielded a feeling of shame to which Baxter might relate. As I played with the app, an embarrassing number of iterations looked something like this: “My short essay, up this morning.” Self promotion is an ugly game, and, so, mea culpa.

“This was just for fun,” Klibaite told me. “We never thought we would get further than showing this off at the Hackathon and to our friends on Facebook.” But by Tuesday afternoon, the app had been linked to by Gawker and many other sites, and images of people’s experiments in prose-mining self-analysis were quickly filling up Twitter feeds. As the app gained popularity, the creators added a prompt encouraging users to consider donating to the victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. (The app requires users to log in through Facebook, but its creators said in an e-mail: “Everything happens user-side. We never see any information, including user names, posts or anything else. We don’t even have a database.”)

By my twentieth or so try—after phrases like “Panic again returns” and “Thanks, whoever put a flour tortilla…” and “My short story confuses…”—I got, “Blessed New Yorker, in Boston with muted expectations,” which pulls together my professional, regional, and sometimes emotional details to yield a nicely balanced descriptive sentiment—one that grants me saintly status to boot. If I was briefly moved by this phrase, it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, since I’d already written it, in effect, in the past. Or at least that’s what the app makes you think. It rephrases old boasts and brags and other shares into something that looks, from an angle, at least, like the poetry and prose you might have written had you taken the time to be creative. Of course, it’s really just robots. (Well, machines.)

After a while, I realized that amid all the happy posts about birthdays and vacations and weddings there lurks the darker bits of the human experience. But such phrases are mostly meaningful just for the user. I found myself quickly tired of the ones that other people were sharing, and drawn back to my own, sure that they were funnier or contained more depth. Narcissism and nostalgia are two of the driving forces of Facebook’s popularity, and this new app combines both quite neatly. The last word combination I got was my favorite, so I decided to end on a high note. It was a nice encapsulation of the salad days, how we’ll explain it all to the grandkids: “Years of shenanigans, and odd drivers, and some groceries.”

Image from the app What Would I Say?

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.